Women are largely expected to wear makeup at least on occasion, although I would go as far as to say that the average woman only wears makeup a handful of times a month. When you take specific economic factors in account, it’s even less universal, because women whose jobs are more physically demanding are less likely to wear makeup. Ex, a CNA in a facility that requires a lot of lifting and turning patients is less likely to feel that she has to wear makeup to work, while a doctor almost certainly has to wear some level of makeup to be taken seriously. A woman who works in a facility’s kitchen sweating all day is less likely to have makeup play a part of her job needs than a woman waiting tables for tips.
And some women may be able to go through their lives without feeling any real level of pressure to wear makeup, and that’s largely due to the fact that they conform to gendered expectations more fully than many other women are seen as doing. Like, a woman who is seen as conventionally attractive and wears fitted clothes, has long hair, a delicate bone structure, is pale skinned in their community, and is thin with noticeable breasts is likely able to go without makeup completely, sometimes even to special events.
While a woman whose very body is seen as performing womanhood inappropriately will be required to compensate for that in a multitude of ways.
Because of this, it’s easy for people who have no real interest to engage about the difficulties of women’s experience to say that makeup is wholly a personal choice, devoid of political force. Because they can easily point to many of the women in their own personal lives hardly ever wearing makeup, so it’s not a real issue.
And this is largely because it frames the issue as just that: women feeling they have to wear makeup. Instead of women being punished for not conforming to a very specific and rigid gendered expectation. And it’s one of the reasons heterosexual feminists who argue women should be freed from the expectation of makeup will still present huge amounts of distaste and hatred for gnc women and ‘mannish dykes’.
Like. If tomorrow, it was just as normal and expected for men to wear makeup as it is for women, women’s lot in the world would not be improved in the slightest. If your could go back and somehow prevent makeup from ever being a thing, women would still suffer in the same ways, the rituals women must perform would simply look slightly different.
TL;DR: By choosing to focus on an issue that while real is easily dismissed and impacted by a million other factors because it is a symptom of the much larger problem without discussing what the problem is and that this is simply a single facet of how it happens, the argument is easily dismissed and frankly not going to do much but loosen the shackles on a very limited number of women while most experience no loosening of their chains.
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